Harry Truman may not have given his party victory at Philadelphia, but he gave it self-respect. It was fun to see the scrappy little cuss come out of his corner fighting at two in the morning, not trying to use big words any longer, but being himself and saying a lot of honest things that needed to be said. Unaccountably, we found ourself on top of a pine bench cheering.
We have always thought of Truman as Mr. Average Man himself, nice and likable and commonplace and mediocre. These attributes make something of a problem when one is President.

There can be no doubt that the Russians deliberately created the Berlin crisis. Every step they have taken in recent months has been designed to cause a chaotic situation which, they hoped, would drive the Western Allies out of the German capital.

THE LIBERALS who choose not to support Henry Wallace and the New Party are still far from clear about whom they are for or what they should be doing about it. Some have buried themselves in their gardens and their books until a better day. Some, with government jobs or patronage to protect, are feebly trying to justify going along with another term for Truman. Most of them talk wistfully over their dinner tables about how nice it would be . . . "if we had a candidate." They mean on the Democratic ticket. The most active among them are either talking for Supreme Court Justice William O.

Bend Sinister
By Vladimir Nabokov
Henry Holt and Company; $2.75.
The story of the free man under the totalitarian state is still the classic tragedy of our age, and in Bend Sinister it is given striking and original treatment, at once impressive, powerful and oddly exasperating. This second novel in English by Vladimir Nabokov, an American citizen of Russian birth, a sardonic tale of an intellectual who scorned his nation's tyrant, has an eerie, nightmare quality and savage humor.

Your radio reporter was having a tough time. The weekly sermon, its text presumably based on what's new, fresh or vigorous in radio, threatened to turn into a dull, depressing dissertation. But along came Old Gold cigarettes, Ballantine's ale and Pabst's Blue Ribbon beer. The day, the preachment, the season were saved. For those ate the generous firms which, in my listening area, bring me respectively Red Barber, Mel Allen and Frankie Frisch.It was exactly 1:55 p.m.

Laurence Olivier’s spectacle-film, Henry V, is a sparkling armor-and-woolen-goods movie about a glorious English leader (Olivier), his smashing, upset victory over the French (who had too much armor, too few archers) in 1415, and his lightning courtship—made up of tricky, beautiful talk and vaudeville—of the French princess Katherine (Renée Asherson). Henry V is a great deal more than almost any other hell-bent-for-armor movie that you’ve seen.